Hearing Restoration through Optical Wireless Cochlear Implants

In this chapter, we present two novel optical wireless-based cochlear implant architectures: (i) optical wireless cochlear implant (OWCI) and (ii) all-optical cochlear implant (AOCI). Both the architectures aim to decisively improve the reliability and energy efficiency of hearing restoration devices. To provide design and development guidelines, we document their main components, discuss the particularities of the transdermal optical channel, and provide the analytical framework for their accurate modeling. Building upon this framework, we extract closed-form formulas that quantify the communication, the stimulation, and the overall performance. An overall comparison of OWCI and AOCI, as well as conventional cochlear implants, accompanied by future research directions summarizes this chapter. Our findings reveal that both the OWCI and the AOCI outperform conventional cochlear implant approaches; thus, they are identified as promising architectures for the next generation of cochlear implants